The problem is that the RecordConverter is not aware of the hive schema.
The ReadSupport should pass the Hive schema (with hive types) to the RecordConverter here:
https://github.com/Parquet/parquet-mr/blob/a9e2c7d5fc862fe422624e29b7bcb6a8dafdb2da/parquet-hive/src/main/java/parquet/hive/read/DataWritableReadSupport.java#L104
We should traverse both Parquet schema and Hive schema in parallel to have the correct converter.

@nongli: This is a bigger change, if you need this working quickly we can do the change you are suggesting and open an issue to fix it at the Converter level.